Reptiles and Reviews, 2001_04_29:17:53
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Creatures
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The kids and I went reptile and amphibian hunting today at the conservation area, which is a tract of land set aside to let nature happen. The day was sunny but still not all that warm. Even so, creatures were out in abundance. We saw a racer, which is a black snake with a small head that distinguishes it from the otherwise similar black rat snake, whose head is more arrow-head shaped. The black rat snake has a whiter underside, too, but that's hard to see unless the snake is well-trained and will roll over and play dead on command, which this one wasn't. The racer zipped across the trail in front of Tim and then kindly stopped a few feet into the bush so we could get a good look at him. According to the field-guide, they are apt to shake their tails back and forth to rattle dry leaves in a passably good imitation of a rattle-snake sound, but ours was beneath some evergreens on a carpet of dry needles, so we didn't get to see that. Lots of spring peepers where audible, but none seen--they're very small tree frogs, and while it seems like you ought to be able to locate one from its very clear peeping cry, they always go quiet when you get even a little close, making the zeroing in almost impossible. And at only about an inch long, they aren't really visible until you're almost on top of them. The other win on the reptile front was painted turtles, which are the most common kind around here. We saw three--two basking on a log well out in a pond, with their skinny necks stretched way out, and one a side trail that had pulled its legs and head in to protect itself from us looming aliens. This is the first time the kids have seen a turtle up close, I think, and it was a very good view--I had them lie down beside it a few feet away so they could get a good look at its legs and head, after doing so myself. There's no point in being out in nature unless you're willing to roll around in it a bit. Some chickadees came by to check us out while we ate a picnic lunch. The kids had ham sandwiches, but I had a sandwich of some left-over steak from dinner, and wanted to heat it up. So I'd packed an old, clean coffee tin and the 8 X 10 inch Fresnel lens I bought a while back, and was able to warm the steak by putting it in the coffee tin and focusing the sun on it in a fairly broad spot. I had to be careful not to over-focus, or it started to scorch pretty quickly. It probably took five or ten minutes to get it warm enough to be palatable--not bad for a first try! The next step is to set up some dowels to hold the lens in place so I don't have to use both hands and keep working to stop the focus from wandering while at the same time making sure I don't start a brush-fire. Its mating season for butterflies, and we saw many varieties, including something that looked like a blue cabbage moth, although I'm not sure they come in blue. The most spectacular had a white fringe, a black band inside the white fringe that was populated by purple spots, and inside that a maroon color. Using the kid's butterfly wall chart I was able to identify it pretty positively as a "mourning cloak" when we got home. The mourning cloak and most of the other butterflies we saw came in pairs that were dancing around each other pretty aggressively, causing Alex to comment laconically, "They must be mating." Maybe next weekend I'll get the canoe out, and we'll be able to get into some of the backwaters that are only accessible when the lakes are high. |
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Reading
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I really need to start sections for different authors to make it easier to sort on. A short list of stuff I've read recently that I haven't had time to talk about:
Twain's semi-biographical tale has all the strengths and weaknesses typical of his non-fiction. While showing us the river and its inhabitants he's delightful. While telling us of the business of the riverboat pilot he's fairly entertaining. And while telling us tall tales and reminiscing about long-gone acquaintances he's dead boring. The book could easily stand to be half it's actual length, although I'm not sure different readers would agree on which half. For myself, once the book passes out of his youth, my interest in Twain starts to wane. For all of that, his humorous and matter-of-fact history of the river and the peculiarities of its ever-shifting geography is wonderful. One wonders if any of the strange geo-political events he speculates about ever occurred. Rivers flowing through silt beds, as the Mississippi does, meander. This is caused by the instability of the banks against erosion: if a river starts to get a bit of bulge on one side at some point, the water has to flow a little faster there, which causes it to erode the bank more swiftly, starting a curve. Meanwhile, on the inner bank of the curve, the water must slow down a bit, causing it to deposit some of its load of silt. The curve grows, and can eventually swing through 360 degrees, and pinch off a ring lake with an island in the middle, as the river takes a new and straighter course through the pinch. This kind of phenomenon can result, at least theoretically, in the river changing direction along some segments of its length, and can also transfer pieces of real estate from one political jurisdiction to another, causing Twain to speculate that it was possible for a person to go to bed as nominal property in a slave state and wake up as a legally as well as actually free person in a free state. =================== The Archivist is a curious tale of a librarian (a species for whom I have little natural sympathy, as I love to read books, whereas most librarians seem to feel that books are non-renewable resources that are diminished by readers actually looking at the words) who is in charge of a collection of letters from T.S. Eliot to a woman he was in love with. The name of Eliot's nominal mistress has been changed, and the archival institution is never named, but the parallels with reality are sufficient to be interesting. The archivist himself is haunted by the memories of his dead wife, who, like Eliot's wife, spent her last years in a mental institution. The book raises interesting questions of the responsibilities of the living to the dead, and fails to answer them, at least in a way that I found satisfactory. =================== Summer of the Redeemers is a grotesque book that rises above itself. It is a coming-of-age story of a southern girl living in an apparently idyllic rural setting. Her father is an academic who teaches journalism at various universities, and is mostly not around. Her mother writes children's stories, and is absent in other ways. Her grandmother is the only adult she has who is well-connected with her present reality. The summer of her 13th year brings all sorts of changes and challenges, and sometimes the author lets events get away from her. But it's interesting to see the world through the awakening eyes of a young woman who discovers both that the world is far wider than she ever dreamed of, and far more dangerous as well. =================== Decline and Fall is Waugh's first novel, yet it contains all of the things I think of as characteristic of him. The feckless, slightly fey characters who wander from one improbable event to the next like atoms bouncing randomly off the asylum walls, the quick conversational sketches that say more than a thousand lines of narrative, and the vaguely unsatisfactory ending. "Not as good as Scoop" is my general assessment of most of Waugh's work, for while Scoop is a bit of fluff it's unpretentious about it. Decline and Fall is less pretentious than much of Waugh's later work, but the deliberate choice of a non-entity as the central character is just a bit too much. |